I don't understand why Intel is so adament to support Rambus whereas memory makers would really like to forget it.
Intel bought some shares of Rambus Inc. sure, but frankly Rambus is a really small company compared with Intel, so I don't think it is a major point.
Technically, I'm not sure at all that Rambus is superior to cheaper alternatives: SDRAM at 133 MHz is only a first step: DDR SDRAM (which transfers data twice per clock cycle) should have a bandwith comparable to the Rambus memory AND they should have a LOWER LATENCY (and a lower price too!). So ?
For those who don't konow: the latency is also very,very important, the bandwith is not the only thing to look at... (especially the maximum theoretical bandwith!).
Uh ? In fact limiting the freedom of speech for a few limited cases is not necessarily a bad idea.
I'm all for the banning of 'preech hate speech in germany', in fact we have the same thing in France.
I'm sure that there are problem with the freedom in France, but right now I don't see big problems.
Of course it always hard to be objective about your country...
And I always found that in the 'land of freedom', in some state, Anal sex, masturbation and oral sex are unlawful, but any citizen have the right to buy guns... That's a kind of freedom, I don't want to see here !
As you are inside the project, may be you could tell me: how this "space ball" is going to know where it is ?
I can see two solution: a) this ball carry a very precise accelerometer b) you put radio emitters in the space station and the ball use these emitter to know where it is.
And how the astronaut are going to move this ball ?: - vocal orders:"go left, right, up" - use a joystick - a laser pointer (as someone else suggested it)
Is this ball is able to emit images, otherwise it must operate under the direct supervision of astronauts, which limits the usefulness of the thing...
Transputer had problems too, sure the hardware side was really neat for their times, but the software sucked.
OCCAMM was a good language but parallel programming is hard. And their C compiler was buggy according to a friend of mine who had to program these things.
Goo hardware, poor software --> useless.
And then, they took a loooonnng time to build a new generation of CPU (I don't remenber the number)...
Poor C compiler + vaporware CPU equal bankrupcy, no matter how good the architecture is.
I've read an interesting article in the french edition of scientific american, a GA was used to find patterns while playing against human in 'paper scissor rock' like games.
It was used to find patterns in the human play, and it performed quite well.
I wonder if GA could be used for playing GO or other similar games in which minmax-type software are poor.
I do fully agree with you! What makes Slashdot interesting is the discussion that follows each topic, the only bad point is that sometimes the discussion will degenerate into a flame war instead of talking of really interesting topics.
But the moderation system is really nice, it generates a "summary" of the really interesting points. Even if sometimes, it feels weird to read a reply to an unknown post.
Unfortunately even this moderation system has limits, for example there has been recently discussion about the shortcomings of X, should it be replaced or not which generated 500+ comments of susprisingly good quality (mostly), so I was kind of lost due to the volume, but hey nothing is perfect.
The only suggestion I could make is to have someone payed to make summaries of topics which have generated a big interest...
> There is a *great* misconception among the > Slashdot crowd about the speed of modern Java VMs.
Well, there is a reason for that: one year ago I developped a small application in Java/Swimg with the JDK 1.1.7 and then the Java2 platform, it's target was a P166 with 16 MB of RAM with Windows95 : it was toooo sloooow, I added 32 MB of RAM and it ran just slowly.
> The 2D rendering library still has some performance problems Too bad, it's the part which is used by many application.
> Only the GUI stuff is slow and only in certain areas, so it's merely a subjective impression that Java is slow.
Sorry but we're talking about choosing a GUI toolkit here, so that's a bad point.
Oh BTW did I say that printing in Java2 was incompatible with the printing with JDK1.1.7, that it was really sloooooww (many times, I thought that the process was dead but it wasn't!) and that it is really hard to print non trivial thing in Java (such as a formatted text page with some images in it)...
For me, that's the main problem with Java, there are many bugs which are in the libraries or even in the GC.
And if you don't believe me, look at the bug parade at the Sun site, the "first" bug has been there for more that a year (!!!) and it is still not corrected in the latest release of the JDK...
Java the language is quite good, but it is just yet another language, not superior to Eiffel for example. Java the platform which promises portability is a very good concept but it's implementation sucks IMHO: AWT was a really bad design, Swing has a good design but it is very slow and buggy!
To summarize my point: Microsoft is not the biggest problem with Java, you can choose if you want to use their tools or not. But on the other hand there are too many bugs in Sun's JDK which makes Java a nice toy to do small things but not something I would use to build "real" applications... Too bad, at first I thought that Java was a really good idea:-(
Right now there are 528 comments on this topic and it is still growing.
This is getting frustrating as I don't have the time to read them all (gave up after reading about 200 comments...), and the future of X is IMHO an important topic.
So is there any brave man who feels like making a summary of the interesting comments ?
OK, call me lazy if you want, but I'm sure that there are others who didn't have the courage to read all these comments...
Anyway it is nice to see that this topic hasn't degenerated as an advocacy topic (my GUI is better than yours) and that people tries to evaluate the true technical advantage/disadvantage of X11.
Even if I have used XLib, I think that I'm not knowledgable enough to have an opinion on this matter, it always interesting to see these comments.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why Intel is so adament to support Rambus whereas memory makers would really like to forget it.
Intel bought some shares of Rambus Inc. sure, but frankly Rambus is a really small company compared with Intel, so I don't think it is a major point.
Technically, I'm not sure at all that Rambus is superior to cheaper alternatives: SDRAM at 133 MHz is only a first step: DDR SDRAM (which transfers data twice per clock cycle) should have a bandwith comparable to the Rambus memory AND they should have a LOWER LATENCY (and a lower price too!). So ?
For those who don't konow: the latency is also very,very important, the bandwith is not the only thing to look at... (especially the maximum theoretical bandwith!).
Speeding the CPU and associated I/O channels is NOT ENOUGH, it won't do you any good if you spend all your time waiting for the memory...
That's why companies are putting lots of memory cache into the CPU...
MHz alone is a poor measure of CPU performances
Uh ? In fact limiting the freedom of speech for a few limited cases is not necessarily a bad idea.
I'm all for the banning of 'preech hate speech in germany', in fact we have the same thing in France.
I'm sure that there are problem with the freedom in France, but right now I don't see big problems.
Of course it always hard to be objective about your country...
And I always found that in the 'land of freedom', in some state, Anal sex, masturbation and oral sex are unlawful, but any citizen have the right to buy guns... That's a kind of freedom, I don't want to see here !
As you are inside the project, may be you could tell me: how this "space ball" is going to know where it is ?
I can see two solution:
a) this ball carry a very precise accelerometer
b) you put radio emitters in the space station and the ball use these emitter to know where it is.
And how the astronaut are going to move this ball ?:
- vocal orders:"go left, right, up"
- use a joystick
- a laser pointer (as someone else suggested it)
Is this ball is able to emit images, otherwise it must operate under the direct supervision of astronauts, which limits the usefulness of the thing...
SEGA is about to launch its Dreamcast in the US and at the same time, some analysts say that Sony will have to delay the launch of its Playstation 2.
Moral of the story: wait and see.
Transputer had problems too, sure the hardware side was really neat for their times, but the software sucked.
OCCAMM was a good language but parallel programming is hard.
And their C compiler was buggy according to a friend of mine who had to program these things.
Goo hardware, poor software --> useless.
And then, they took a loooonnng time to build a new generation of CPU (I don't remenber the number)...
Poor C compiler + vaporware CPU equal bankrupcy, no matter how good the architecture is.
I've read an interesting article in the french edition of scientific american, a GA was used to find patterns while playing against human in 'paper scissor rock' like games.
It was used to find patterns in the human play, and it performed quite well.
I wonder if GA could be used for playing GO or other similar games in which minmax-type software are poor.
> I think Slashdot is a kind of metajournalism.
I do fully agree with you!
What makes Slashdot interesting is the discussion that follows each topic, the only bad point is that sometimes the discussion will degenerate into a flame war instead of talking of really interesting topics.
But the moderation system is really nice, it generates a "summary" of the really interesting points. Even if sometimes, it feels weird to read a reply to an unknown post.
Unfortunately even this moderation system has limits, for example there has been recently discussion about the shortcomings of X, should it be replaced or not which generated 500+ comments of susprisingly good quality (mostly), so I was kind of lost due to the volume, but hey nothing is perfect.
The only suggestion I could make is to have someone payed to make summaries of topics which have generated a big interest...
> There is a *great* misconception among the
> Slashdot crowd about the speed of modern Java VMs.
Well, there is a reason for that: one year ago I developped a small application in Java/Swimg with the JDK 1.1.7 and then the Java2 platform, it's target was a P166 with 16 MB of RAM with Windows95 : it was toooo sloooow, I added 32 MB of RAM and it ran just slowly.
> The 2D rendering library still has some performance problems
Too bad, it's the part which is used by many application.
> Only the GUI stuff is slow and only in certain areas, so it's merely a subjective impression that Java is slow.
Sorry but we're talking about choosing a GUI toolkit here, so that's a bad point.
Oh BTW did I say that printing in Java2 was incompatible with the printing with JDK1.1.7, that it was really sloooooww (many times, I thought that the process was dead but it wasn't!) and that it is really hard to print non trivial thing in Java (such as a formatted text page with some images in it)...
For me, that's the main problem with Java, there are many bugs which are in the libraries or even in the GC.
:-(
And if you don't believe me, look at the bug parade at the Sun site, the "first" bug has been there for more that a year (!!!) and it is still not corrected in the latest release of the JDK...
Java the language is quite good, but it is just yet another language, not superior to Eiffel for example.
Java the platform which promises portability is a very good concept but it's implementation sucks IMHO: AWT was a really bad design, Swing has a good design but it is very slow and buggy!
To summarize my point: Microsoft is not the biggest problem with Java, you can choose if you want to use their tools or not.
But on the other hand there are too many bugs in Sun's JDK which makes Java a nice toy to do small things but not something I would use to build "real" applications...
Too bad, at first I thought that Java was a really good idea
Right now there are 528 comments on this topic and it is still growing.
This is getting frustrating as I don't have the time to read them all (gave up after reading about 200 comments...), and the future of X is IMHO an important topic.
So is there any brave man who feels like making a summary of the interesting comments ?
OK, call me lazy if you want, but I'm sure that there are others who didn't have the courage to read all these comments...
Anyway it is nice to see that this topic hasn't degenerated as an advocacy topic (my GUI is better than yours) and that people tries to evaluate the true technical advantage/disadvantage of X11.
Even if I have used XLib, I think that I'm not knowledgable enough to have an opinion on this matter, it always interesting to see these comments.
Have a nice day.
Hooray too!
I bought one Logitech mouse last week, it must have been a premonition.
Ok, this super-computer-FPGA things looks like a stupid PR thing, but don't write stupid things about nanotechnology.
:-)
lead and gold are different atoms so nanotechnology (building object by assembling precisely atoms) can't help here.
But diamond is another story